Isn’t it such a hassle to have thick patch cords making it difficult to organize on your panel?
The cabling manufacturers notice this problem and produced a new tiny 28 AWG Patch Cord!
These higher density patch cords are congesting the entire panel cutting off airflow to the active equipment. The cable management on these thicker cables is a nightmare when you have a full panel.
At first, ANSI/TIA would not recognize these 22 to 28 AWG patch cords, but due to high popularity, they didn’t have a choice. This year they approved the new ANSI/TIA-568.2-D cabling standard for 28 AWG patch cord.
What are the faults of a tiny patch cord?
Due to the smaller diameter of the cord, it produces more DC resistance and increases proportionately with the length of the cable. Because of the smaller diameter, the TIA standard on these patch cords can be no longer than 15 meters.
Also, TIA & ISO/IEC are working on a standard regarding the bundle size of the cables. While these cords are used in remote powering applications, they are producing higher heat levels, so lower cable buddle size should be taken into consideration.
Due to the conductor size and overall length of these 28 AWG patch cords, the important performance parameters of these cables exhibit a higher insertion loss. Since the loss is directly related to the length of a channel, these patch cords require the overall length of the channel to be reduced. These patch cords are mostly used in high volume data centers, so channel sizes are well below the max length.
Conclusion
Overall, the positives of the 28 AWG patch cords dramatically improved the must needed airflow issues to equipment and helped drastically managing the cable system. With the only major negative to these patch cords being the channel length, it is easy to say these new smaller patch cords are changing the data center game.
